We recently bought a Blackberry 8820 here in the UK on Orange. The handset was purchased with the mindset that it would emulate email as if it was being exchanged around the office. I installed the 1 user version of BES and set that up fine, as we dont have a wireless network I activated it using the USB cable and set myself a test email, which worked fine.

I then disconnect the handset from the server and try an email. I quickly get a reply saying "Message status: service blocked". In the meantime I have set up a @blackberry.orange.co.uk email address on the Blackberry which I find is a good way of forwarding mail as well as "appearing" to be from the correct address. The only thing that I havent managed yet is to forward a sent item on Blackberry to the mailbox on Exchange, which I know can be done easily on BES.

I have phoned Orange about the "Service blocked" error and they washed their hands of it. My question is have I completely got the wrong end of the stick or is there something minor I am missing to get it working with BES?

Very much worth the call, and you should be able to do an activation over the air, OTA, WiFi or not, it is designed to work over the cellular side anyway. i don't actually give my users the USB cable anyway, all activation is done OTA.

Don't forget that a BES needs to talk to a mail server at your end as well. In cse others step in to help an indication of mail platform may help them.

Well our main support guys have checked my installtion and said it should work fine, however they said they needed to go through one more thing with me. He has been off work ill the past week or so I thought I would try and figure it out myself.

I tried phoning Orange when I first got the handset and as I mentioned the Blackberry software they didnt want to know and said they dont support it. Is it worth a second try?

Ha Ha Ha - well what do you expect from an average Organge CS.

I'd second DavidAdams original response and actually bet you ten quid that the problem is that Orange haven't provisioned you correctly on the Enterprise plan.

Get that sorted - demand to speak to supervisor or tech support that actually support BB's and they should be able to sort your out correctly - it probably will cost you more money per month however...